The Spiritual Business of Life Coaching

I am a life coach and here to say that the world would be a better - more peaceful, compassionate and joyful - place, if lots more people had coaches.

I know that sounds utterly self-serving, but from my perspective anyway, it’s the truth - and I like to speak the truth! As one who has, for years, coached myriad women and men, aged twenty-something to well beyond sixty, I speak from rich, rewarding experience. I might add that I’m doing what I do now, and loving it, thanks to having had a three-year coach of my own.

One reason life coaching is so powerful is that, at its best, it’s a supremely spiritual activity. It helps us get to the heart (and soul) of who we are and why we’re here. What’s more, it’s practical, because it inspires us to create, live, and love our lives from that ever-expanding sense of self.

The Coaching Experience

Unlike counseling, which deals with what’s awry, may look back and ask “ why,” coaching builds on what’s working, propels us forward, and asks “why not?” In its insistence that we be all we can be, coaching can be an ideal next step for folks completing therapy. “I feel fine; now what do I want to do about it?” Amazing to say, this potentially deep, sacred work happens over the phone!

A series of regularly scheduled coaching calls is the work’s foundation. These can be enhanced by email and other contact in-between calls. In this unusual way, the life coach guides and encourages clients to create and live an authentic, soul-satisfying life from the inside out, at work and at play. A client usually pays a monthly retainer. That can range from a few hundred dollars to four figure fees, for high-level executive coaching. With me, it’s a flexible month by month (not by-the-hour) proposition, with services custom-designed to meet each client’s particular needs.

Now, to how and why life coaching is so effective - at least as I do and see it.

The Heart of Coaching

Whatever we human beings do in the world, we experience from the inside out. We receive and interpret our lives from the mysterious place of “who we are.” That includes our five senses, and our mind, of course. But we also know and partake in the world around us through what I’ll call our core being: the energy or “consciousness” that both infuses, and is more than, our body and mind It’s what Eastern spiritual disciplines refer to as prana, chi and ki. Life is satisfying - or not - to the extent we participate whole-heartedly (body, mind and spirit) in creating and experiencing it.

If we are not affected deep down, where we really “live,” then we are not going to be fulfilled, no matter how fabulous the life we are creating and living may look from outside. We all know, or know of, our share of wildly successful, miserable people who have “great lives”! Or do they?

To help clients create the “life of their dreams” that coaching promises, I as coach need to help them get crystal clear about two things. The first is: who they most essentially are, including what matters most and is truly satisfying to them. That’s so they’ll be sure to create the “right” life for them. If they don’t really know themselves and what they love, they might recreate their parent’s lives, or design a life that someone else (say, a spouse) has in mind for them.

At least as important is the second part of the equation. In order to enjoy the life they create, clients must know how to take life in. They must become masters at being satisfied by what they have and what they do - and especially by who they are - from moment to unpredictable moment. They must learn to understand that once they have done their best, whatever life yields as a “result” is not for them to worry about. Or, as my increasingly philosophical husband likes to say, “It is what it is.” There may even be hidden benefits to things turning out differently than we had expected.

Most of us, I notice, have been so busy doing, that being has eluded us. We don’t know much about who we are deep-down, or how to be satisfied, let alone nourished by what life offers us. And if we don’t know how to savor what’s on our plate right now, what makes us think we’re going to be any better at enjoying the next course, however tasty?

Finding The Client Within

As much as anything, coaching is about training folks in the art of living truly, with the coach as teacher and guide. For in the coaching relationship I’m describing, coach and client are embarked on a remarkably challenging and rewarding joint venture: an all-out, no-holds-barred search for what a favorite ancient yogic scripture of mine calls “the tiny person within the heart”. It’s who we are beyond all the external conditioning, particular beliefs, variable emotions, and habitual behaviors we usually call “me, myself and I”. It’s also sometimes called the Authentic Self, the Universal Self, or the Self of All. I see it as my primary job to help clients unearth and live from it. If we settle for anything less, I – and more importantly, they - won’t be satisfied for long.

The Coaching Process

But how does a coach even begin to create a space vast and sacred enough to call forth this essential self of the client’s? What might this process look like in the context of the coaching relationship, or even within a single coaching call?

The basic coaching skills, which are taught as part of the many different coach-training programs, definitely apply. These are, in fact, the familiar skills of any caring relationship. They include: listening, intuiting, discerning, reflecting, questioning, challenging, championing, and empathizing, to name several of the most important. Two other coaching/relationship skills that I value most highly are humor, and - the greatest and most rare of all - unconditional love and the powerful trust that both feeds and proceeds from such precious love.

Given my primary mission to help clients uncover a whole and holy self, how should I apply these skills? What am I listening for, trying to discern, and wanting to reflect back to my clients? When do I question and challenge, where champion them? And to me, the most important matter: how am I - and my client - being with our selves, and with each other, as we do this compelling work? What in other words, is, and what should be, the underlying feel, tone or “process,” the essence of our experience together, if the work is to be effective? These are the harder and more interesting questions.

And here is a critical point: I can hear, recognize, reflect back and champion for clients “the whole and holy” - the divine - within them, only to the extent that I am learning to see that in myself.  Similarly, I can only question and challenge them well if I am consistently holding myself to my own high standards. To help clients sort the kernels of what’s true and compelling from the often addictive, unconscious chaff of self-limiting beliefs and behaviors, and live from that knowledge, I’d better be doing that big-time for the coach-in-charge.

For it is, of course, precisely to the extent that I am clear and present, and comfortable with myself and my humanity, that I can be clear and present and comfortable with theirs. Clarity and charity both begin at home!

Creating Client Consciousness, Compassion and Courage

So, as important as the coaching tools are, it is ultimately the quality of being (mine and theirs) that matters most to the client’s transformation. But as the coach, it is my job to set the tone. Much as I’d sometimes like to, there’s no getting around it. I polish the mirror and hold the space for clients to be aware, loving, and fiercely true to themselves most effectively by being that way myself. That’s primarily because energy is infectious, and love is inspiring.

What’s more, since being aware, loving and true to ourselves is our essential nature, and thus very integral and attractive to us, such behavior is practically impossible to resist. Clients catch the “bugs” of consciousness, compassion and courage (my “3 C’s” of invaluable coaching) best by observing (or listening on the phone), and even just by being in the presence of one who is being authentic, loving and brave. They get it by osmosis; but we can, of course, help it along. Here’s how:

“What is true for you?” is the sort of question I cannot ask too often. Many clients claim they don’t know what they want in a particular situation. They’re right, if they mean their minds don’t yet know the way to go. 

When faced with a choice, the mind will refer us to what we’ve done before, and to what others might do or want us to do. And thanks to any unexamined beliefs we still hold about human behavior (especially our own), mind is enamored of what it thinks we should do. What it cannot easily tell us is what we want to do. Unless it’s totally unfettered, and thus illumined by the wisdom of soul, mind simply doesn’t know.

For such knowledge, we must check in with the body and its swarm of often unwelcome emotions. To uncover our heart’s desire, we must look to…well, our hearts - or for that matter - to our guts, throats, or practically anywhere but our heads! It’s through the body that self-awareness - or consciousness (as well as the compassion and courage parts of my “Three C’s”) - comes.

While the messages of fickle, ego-driven mind may or may not have much to do with who we are and what we really want, the body cannot lie. We can try to mask its signals certainly. Most of us learn to drown—or drug— them out. We can ignore bodily sensations altogether (to a point). But they’re there anyway, below the surface - a wealth of feelings, ready, if we let them, to mirror our soul, to show us our own dear selves.

Putting Clients in Touch

When we are willing to tune into what we feel, our emotions offer the most reliable and trustworthy barometer I know of. We may not like what we learn, but when we let it, the body will flood us with sensations of unadulterated truth about our most pressing, soulful wants and needs. Like words to the mind, feelings are the voice of the soul. If we wish to know ourselves better, then we’d best learn to uncover, listen to and trust our emotions as the opening into consciousness that they are.

When my clients tell me they don’t know what’s true, or what they want, I don’t believe them. Thanks to decades of experience as a yoga teacher, body-mind therapist, coach, and curious human being, I’ve come to trust that those of us who are more or less “sane” know exactly what we do and don’t want. Sometimes, though, we don’t want to know. Those who really don’t want to know are probably not ready for coaching!).

When clients ask me, “what should I do?” I toss the ball right back to them. “How would it be,” I might say, “if we checked in with your body? Let’s see what you may know, okay?”

We might grow quiet then. I may give a bit of meditative guidance, to help us both get out of our heads and down into those sentient bodies of ours. In this simple but powerful way, we create time and space (and plenty of permission) for clients to feel their feelings, to begin to know their hearts. That’s often all that’s needed for them to recognize and be willing to want what they want.

If clients resist relaxing into feeling, I sometimes suggest they put one hand over the heart, the other over the stomach. We take a few deep breaths. I want to put them in touch, literally, with the inspired, gutsy person they intrinsically are. We’re doing this over the phone, remember. And perhaps because we can’t see each other (and they aren’t worried about me), tuning in can happen fast.

I have not yet met the client who doesn’t dip into body’s consciousness and soon get remarkably clear about who they are, and what they want to do in the moment. Often too, at some point in this “emotionally-connected” space we create, clients come to tears. These may first be of sorrow, but may be followed by tears of natural joy, which the grief has been masking. People are touched, as I am, by the gentle, compassionate promptings of their own awakening hearts.

It’s a huge relief to leave the head. The quiet joy of our heart’s desires, and even the tender authenticity of our deepest sorrows and fears, are inspiring beyond words. They show us what we are made of, the humanity in which our divinity lives.

But when clients tune deep in, they not only get to be conscious of who they are and what they want, they also find and take courage (in French, the heart’s called “coeur”) to do what wants to be done. What’s more, by delving down, past what they are not, to who they most fundamentally are, clients learn to open their hearts wide enough to let the lovely new life they’re creating rush in! Isn’t it great that in discovering who we are, we also open the door to living our truth. As if that weren’t enough, we get to more fully enjoy ourselves—as well as others, whom little by little, we come to see as blessed extensions of that “tiny person within the heart,” the Self of All that we all fundamentally are. Now do you understand why I say it would be a better world if more of us had coaches? I hope so!